140 HY ENA. 
The existing species of Hyena are confined to the 
warmer climates. The striped Hyena (Hyena vulgaris) 
abounds in Abyssinia and Nubia, and extends through 
the adjacent parts of Africa and Asia. The spotted Hy- 
ena, (Hyena crocuta,) and a rarer species, the Hyana 
villosa of Smith, inhabit the Cape of Good Hope. The 
extinct species, to which the present section refers, resem- 
bled more the spotted than the striped Hyena, but was 
a much larger and more formidable animal than either. 
This lost species was first determined by Cuvier, by the ~ 
comparison of fossil remains from Continental localities, 
which proved it to have abounded in that ancient world 
of which his immortal works have stamped him as pecu- 
liarly the naturalist. We find the Hyena, says Cuvier, 
not only in the same caverns which contain so many fossil 
bones of Bears, but also in the unstratified drift, (terrains 
@alluvion,) where the remains of the Elephants are in- 
terred. 
The discovery of the Hyena spelea, as a British fossil, 
is due to Dr. Buckland, im whose graphic and philosophical 
language the circumstances of the discovery, and the de- 
ductions of the habits of the living animals, will be here 
principally narrated. 
In the summer of 1821, the workmen quarrying the 
slope of a limestone rock at Kirkdale, in the vale of 
Pickering, intersected the mouth of a long hole, or cavern, 
closed externally with rubbish and overgrown with grass 
and bushes. Nearly thirty feet of the outer extremity of 
the cave was removed before it was visited by Dr. Buck- 
land, who found its entrance a hole m the perpendicular 
face of the quarry, about three feet high and five broad, 
as represented in the vignette (fig. 60). The cave is 
about twenty feet below the incumbent field, and extends 
